Case study

Gómez's hearing this week, in which she denied any wrongdoing, not only highlighted just how little evidence there is to back up the charges brought against her; it also made one suspect that Catalan separatists may have a point when they accuse the Spanish judiciary of being politicised

Mark Nayler

Malaga

Friday, 20 December 2024, 17:14

If one were to compile a 'Greatest Hits' list of recent corruption cases in Spain (which I'm going to do next week, in the ... last column of 2024), the one involving Pedro Sánchez's wife, Begoña Gómez, would be somewhere near the bottom. Gómez's hearing this week, in which she denied any wrongdoing, not only highlighted (yet again) just how little evidence there is to back up the charges brought against her; it also made one suspect that Catalan separatists may have a point when they accuse the Spanish judiciary of being politicised.

The judge in this case, 70 year-old Juan Carlos Peinado, opened the investigation into Gómez's business affairs on the basis of very flimsy evidence - several online media reports that even the plaintiff, a lobbying group called Manos Limpias ('Clean Hands'), admitted might be false. If Peinado progresses with every case in which the plaintiff can only give him a link to a website when asked for evidence (and a questionable one at that), he must be insanely busy. But of course he doesn't, so one has to ask why he took this one on.

Manos Limpias isn't the only organisation targeting Gómez. When Sánchez's wife first appeared before Peinado back in June, her lawyer (Antonio Camacho, a former Socialist interior minister) halted proceedings after the judge revealed that he had also accepted a case against Gómez by another group called HazteOir ('Make Yourself Heard'). Camacho said that this had come as a surprise, and that Peinado had not made clear what HazteOir was accusing his client of.

Sánchez maintains that the Spanish right has launched a smear campaign against his wife. It's true that both the groups that have brought accusations before Peinado are associated with right-wing politics: Manos Limpias' founder, lawyer Miguel Bernad Remón, was party secretary of the Francoist group Fuerza Nueva; and HazteOir repeatedly attacks one of the modern left's favourite causes, LTBTQ+ rights. Last year, it was fined €20,000 by the Catalan government for driving buses around Barcelona plastered with slogans such as ''No A La Mutilacion Infantil' and 'Les Niñes No Existen'.

To which the only proper response is 'So what?' Any extremist crackpot or self-styled crusader can use the same legal mechanism that these two organisations did to bring a case against a third party: it's called 'the people's accusation'. But that doesn't mean a judge has to launch an investigation into those accusations.

The fact that the allegations which Gómez denied in court this week have not been dismissed has nothing to do with the organisations that made them, far less with the PP or Vox. The case remains open because of the decision of one judge. Unless some evidence against Gómez does emerge, the target of Sánchez's indignation should be the judiciary, not the Spanish right.

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